Heroic description of the struggle of the Iraqi people against war criminal ChurcHitler and his murderous petroleum company cabal…. Oh, wait; wrong war.


In 1941 the Iraqi government changed for the worse (as far as the UK was concerned). Iraq had sort of a strange setup; nominally independent (there was a German Embassy in Baghdad) but “protected” by Great Britain. Four Iraqi colonels (“The Golden Square”) decided they had enough of British quasi-occupation and staged a coup. Iraqi army units occupied a plateau overlooking the RAF base at Habbaniya and sent word that because they wear conducting a live fire training exercise, no airplanes could take off and no one could leave. Since the base only had 12 days of rations, it couldn’t withstand much of a siege.


The base had a couple of companies of “local levies” (which turned out to be surprisingly effective since they were composed of Assyrian Christians and Kurds and therefore had no love for the rest of Iraq). In the meantime, Britain was scraping the bottom the barrel to find units to send to Iraq. A couple of Indian Army brigades were landed at Basra, which surrendered without a fight, a “mobile” force quipped with home-made armored cars and a fleet of city buses and trucks leased in Palestine started eastward across the desert, and some Wellingtons and Blenheims flew in from Egypt.


The Habbaniya base was a training center a flew a miscellaneous assortment of aircraft, including Gladiators, Audaxes, Harts, Oxfords, and the notorious Vickers Valentia, credited with avoiding air attacks by being so slow that opponents inevitably overshot.


Habbaniya gathered an assortment of bombs for its aircraft and proceeded to pummel the Iraqi besiegers. Some Royal Hellenic Airforce pilots there for training were more than happy to chip in. The base also discovered that the two WWI 18-pounders that were used as war memorials in front of the administration building had never been demilitarized, and after liberal application of paint stripper and a shipment of 18-pounder shells flown in on cargo planes from Basra they were brought into action (for disinformation, the British released news reports that the artillery had been transported on specially equipped aircraft).


In the meantime, the Germans quickly did a deal with the Vichy government in Syria and staged some Me-110s and He-111s to northern Iraq. These were surprisingly ineffective; you would think the rag-tag desert column would have been easy prey but there were only four vehicles destroyed, one man killed, and few more wounded. The trek across the desert ended anticlimactically, because the base had already raised the siege through its own efforts. The Golden Square collapsed and Iraq went back to being a rear area.


This is the usual Osprey Campaign book; a relatively slim paperback with nice color paintings and good maps; a more than adequate account of a side show to the Big Show. These tend to be pricey for their volume, but I got mine for half price off a remainder shelf.
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Gli eventi accaduti in Irak nel 1941 ebbero importanti conseguenze strategiche. Le forze dell'Asse bramavano le riserve di petrolio del Paese. Se l'Irak fosse caduto nelle mani dell'Asse, la Gran Bretagna avrebbe perso il proprio punto strategico in Medio Oriente e nel Mediterraneo, rischiando così il proprio ruolo nella Seconda guerra mondiale. Questo libro prende in esame la strategia e le tattiche messe in atto durante la campagna irachena. ( )

This is a very good book.

This booklet is in the Osprey Campaign series. It is about the British campaign in Iraq from April 1 to June 6, 1941, against the Iraqi forces. I found the parts on the origins, chronology, commanders and forces to be very good. As the subtitle indicates, there were four battles, each is well addressed, as is the advance of Habforce (the British forces in Palestine). The Germans, in the form of the Luftwaffe, played a very small part in the operations. The booklet is well illustrated with a good number of maps.

Some minor points:
-- I found the booklet to be slightly prejudiced for the British and against the Iraqi, 'the illegal Iraqi regime'. But this prejudice was only slight.
-- References to aircraft were inconsistent. Sometimes the manufacturer was mentioned (Hawker Audax) and sometimes it wasn't (Blenheim). I wasn't familiar with the Valentia aircraft. Vickers Valentias would have helped. What is an Atlantas? (I believe the author meant Atalantas, as in Armstrong Whitworth A.W. 15 Atalanta.)
-- In the forces part, the author identifies seven Royal Navy ships, but doesn't give their types.
-- In the comparison of aircraft table (page 27), detail data for the CR42 is missing and is in error for the Savoia 79 (as in the illustration, not Saviao in the table).
-- There should be a consistency between spellings, Fallujah (on the cover) and Falluja (in the contents).
-- Where is Zubair, etal, from the disposition of units in the Basra part.
-- I believe that the picture of the returning regent, on page 86, is a reverse image.

I hope that there will be a follow up Campaign booklet on the operations in Syria, however major or minor those operations may have been.

Read from November 28 to 29, 2010. ( )